Into The Darkness

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Into the darkness
Soon you'll be sinking
What are you doing?
What can you be thinking?

- Graham Nash, "Into the Darkness" (1982)

Here is a trio for the ages...and it sure as heck is not Crosby, Stills & Nash.

On the left is Yamaoka Kenji, the yes-man who makes all other yes-men look good by comparison (and who has redefined the verb "to hover"); in the center Ozawa Ichiro ("It's not about me. Oh, who do I think I am kidding? It's always about me!); and to the right Suzuki Muneo, who is an entire library of bad.

This is a photo from the grand opening of the Nagata-cho offices of the Kokumin seikatsu ga dai'ichi to, the People's Life First Party (Corey Wallace had a way better translation of the party name). The acronym for the party's English name is LF.

Everything about yesterday's LF headquarters opening screams, "We have no money!"

- the cheesy sans-serif font of the party name (J) -- though the graphic designer does deserve some credit for having the dot in koku in red.

- the even cheesier party logo, which is the Democratic Party of Japan's logo turned on its side, in green, with the characters sei and katsu inside the circles.

- the unbelievably cheesy two-page pdf of the party's program (J). No, I am not kidding, this is the actual document, courtesy LF Acting President (daihyo daiko) Yamaoka Kenji's blog post about the opening.

- the tiny bottles of green tea, cans of oolong tea and whatever it is that the person in the foreground is holding up at the ceremonial toast:

- the absence of a URL in any of the images of the opening. It is hard to believe -- no, it is impossible to believe -- but after a month since breaking away from the DPJ, the LF, a party with 49 members, still does not have its own website.

- the presence according press reports of 40 members of the Diet at the unveiling, including members from Nihon Daiichi/True Democrats -- meaning that 20% of the LF's Diet contingent did not show up at the grand opening.(J)

As Aurelia George Mulgan noted even before the dust had settled, the July 2 breakaway from the DPJ marked the first time Ozawa walked out of a party without the party's cash hoard in hand. Since LF was not existence on January 1 of this year, it received not a single yen of the more than 8.3 billion yen in public campaign finance handed out on July 20 (J). Indeed, LF, should it choose to accept public funding, will not be receiving its first dollop of cash until April 2013. (J)

While the majority of LF members are either still enamored of Ozawa or at least see an advantage of going along with the charade, more than a few must be sitting at their Diet desks, their head in their hands, asking, "What have I done?"

Image credits:
Top: Jiji Press
Middle: Hokkaido Shimbun
Bottom: Jiji Press

Just Catching Up

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, Following up on the recent post on the new societal panic, the double deaths of caregiver and dependant living in virtual isolation (virtual in that the most famous cases have taken place in urban environments) is a The Mainichi Daily News editorial on the subject (E).

In the recent post on the hanging of Ozawa Ichiro's portrait in the Diet, there was the mention that the House of Representatives Steering Committee had approved the hanging of troubled lawmaker Suzuki Muneo's portrait in the House as well.

Here it is folks, in all its ragged glory.

Let's call the style "Hokkaido Primitive."

Some might say that the portrait makes Suzuki look demented. Some might argue that for Suzuki, demented is a step up.

And yes, that is Sato Masaru on the left, the former Ministry of Foreign Affairs bureaucrat who spent 512 days in pre-trial detention for refusing to answer questions about Suzuki's under-the-table dealings and the man who called Suzuki "MOFA's Rasputin."

Image courtesy: Jiji Press

He Who Laughs Last

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I'm sure my critics will say
It's a grotesque display.
Well they can bite me baby
I perform this way.

- Al Yankovic, "I Perform This Way" (2011)

Despite the best effort of Shukan Bunshun, Kaieda Banri (Wait, was he not Ozawa Ichiro and Hatoyama Yukio's candidate in the last DPJ election? Yes, but he was also the 1996 author of this tome. Ambition has many colors) and mysterious associations working their magic from the shadows Ozawa Ichiro has survived to serve more than 25 years in the Diet. After passing the 25-year milestone, members of the House of Representatives are entitled to a number of perquisites, one of which is the hanging of his or her portrait in the Diet Building.

Ozawa, being a retiring, secretive individual of course...wait, here he is, beaming in front of his portrait as it is being hung for the benefit of the cameras both still and video. In a dose of purest irony, the portrait is hung in the room where the Committee for Judicial Affairs has its meetings.

The portrait has its host of critics. To be sure, it sure clashes with the more genial and relaxed mood of its immediate neighbors.

The Liberal Democratic Party's Hirasawa Katsuei -- "Mr. Abductees Issue" to you and me -- has complained that it gives him the creeps (iwakan - 違和感). "I feel like it's staring at me," he complains. (J)

Hirasawa and others have declaimed that now, while Ozawa is still on trial for violating the political funding laws, is hardly the time to hang his portrait. Such complaints have very little traction, however, given that the House of Representatives Steering Committee has just greenlighted a similar hanging in the Diet of the portrait of jailbird Suzuki Muneo, the multi-year winner of the "Most Corrupt Member of the Diet" in public surveys. (J)

But while Ozawa is beaming, possibly even laughing in the above photo images, I am not sure whether or not the joke is on Ozawa's many enemies or on himself.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, a close-up of the portrait, painted a former graduate of Ozawa's political training school:
I have heard it said that truth is beauty, and beauty truth.

Though my artistic judgments have landed me in trouble of late, I will venture that the adage is hereby proven wrong.

Image courtesies:
Top: Tokyo Shimbun
Middle: Jiji Press
Bottom: TV Asahi

Growth Neither Nominal Nor Real

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, Over the last few days I have had the chance to fulfill a longtime wish: to read Aurelia Mulgan George's Power and Pork: A Japanese Political Life (2006).

It is sobering to read the book six years on, in light of all that has happened since.

At the time of the study's going to print, Matsuoka Toshikatsu, the subject of the study, achieved his life's goal of being named Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, requiring that Dr. George hurriedly insert a few paragraphs on his nomination into the last pages of her manuscript – all which was all to come to naught a few months later when Matsuoka committed suicide, this in order to avoid further Diet inquiry into just the sort of sordid accounting and fund-raising shenanigans Dr. George documents.

"A Political Life" turned out to be a grimly prophetic subtitle.

But it is not only Matsuoka's suicide that provides a somber coda to the work. Nakagawa Sho'ichi, Matsuoka’s predecessor at MAFF and a lifelong antagonist was himself to die at a young age (56) under circumstances that suspiciously looked like suicide, after his untreated alcoholism undid his life's dream of becoming prime minister. If Nakagawa's death was indeed suicide (the investigation into the actual cause of death was willfully unenthusiastic) it was repeat of the death of his father Ichiro, who committed suicide in 1983.

Ichiro's political secretary Suzuki Muneo, who comes across as the sleazeball mentor of Matsuoka, was sent to prison for his funding escapades, but is now rehabilitated as the leader of a regional political movement and a member of the House of Representatives allied with the ruling Democratic Party of Japan – a political marriage of convenience Suzuki parlayed into the chairmanship of the House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs – the committee overseeing and investigating the activities of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the ministry Suzuki had so thoroughly and extensively perverted through intimidation and interference during the years covered in the study.

As for the misuse and misallocation of government funds perfected by Matsuoka and Suzuki during the "Lost Decades" that burned a hole in the Japanese government’s pocket, wasting trillions of yen on makework projects whose operations and maintenance costs far exceed any societal benefit derived from the support they gave temporarily to Japan’s GDP figures, "bad" economic stimulus that has left the country in an Alice in Wonderland state where the government has a net debt greater than 100% of GDP, funds half its budget through bond sales rather than revenues, deflation devours debtors and risk taking, government bond yields are but a shade above 1% despite massive debts and deficits and the current government's policy response – which it labels reform – is to cut spending and raise the consumption tax, despite ironclad economic laws mandating that such actions will shrink the size of the economy, thereby further reducing tax revenues, requiring greater bond issuance to fund the same size national government budget...while the reforms of the Prime Minister's Office's powers to determine policy have evaporated away, leaving Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko buffeted back and forth, a feather in the gale.

It leaves one crying, like the poor father at the end of Coup de Foudre/Entre Nous:

"Quel gâchis! Quel gâchis!"